January 27, 2012 - 6:08pm -- stevphen

From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, technology has played an important role in shaping contemporary resistance and the representation of these events in the media. What new tools of protest and occupation have emerged over the past year? How does their use help to shape tomorrow’s democracies? The Urban Research Group @ Eyebeam and The Public School New York have invited activists, technologists, artists, designers, and community organizers who have a working prototype of an activist technology to occupy a worktable at Eyebeam and share their work with the public. Drawn from proposals submitted through an open call, we have selected a group of projects and communities that extend the creative use of technology and its social implications. Our interest is in creating a platform for encounter, conversation and collaboration. Visit http://demo-day.org/projects for participating project information.

This public event will culminate with a panel discussion at 5pm with special guest Stephen Duncombe, Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communications of New York University and co-creator of the School for Creative Activism; Mary Mattingly, Eyebeam Fellow and the creator of Waterpod; and moderated by Taeyoon Choi, Eyebeam Fellow and member of The Public School New York committee.

January 11, 2012 - 12:58pm -- jim

Global General Strike, May Day 2012

While the mayor brags about the NYPD being his own private army, working people's indignities multiply. At work, under constant surveillance, we struggle for a daily wage, simply to increase the profit margins for our bosses. Previously, the ruling classes had slaves and indentured servants, forcing labor relations through brute force. Today they still have us as slaves and servants through wage labor contracts and fraudulent notions of debt. As we have all seen, debt can be forgiven, in the trillions, to those who own society; but for the rest of us debt is inexcusable, and our lives, our time, our futures, are always negotiable.

January 6, 2012 - 8:00pm -- stevphen

The ideas and practices of Guy Debord and the Situationist International have become a constant reference point for those involved in radical politics, the arts, and cultural theory. Drawing on the work of Debord, Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s latest book Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy argues that the theory of practice and practice of theory are superseded by social upheavals that do the work of philosophy directly. Reading, with discussion following.

January 5, 2012 - 10:06am -- stevphen

Crisis of Everything Everywhere is the potential name for a small scale / molecular / modular / horizontally organized effort to think, speak about, and speculate upon our present.

It will unfold over a period of 9 days, between January 7th and 15th. It will involve various groups and individuals who have explored or been directly involved in the movement of the squares, encampments and occupations of 2011.

Given the fact we are in New York, we will make a special effort to address and consider how those movements have impacted the political and cultural landscape of this city, region and country. And by connecting to other histories and places, to begin to build up an image of what kinds of struggles and challenges may lay ahead in the coming weeks, months, even years.]

January 3, 2012 - 6:20am -- stevphen

A crisis in capitalism is stalking the world. Greed, ecological plunder, famine and displacement off the land increasingly mark the battle lines between the rich and everyone else. Enforced homelessness, social service cuts, and environmental disasters have become regular occurrences. But today we also see people in every corner of the world rising up against these injustices. We are inspired by this “indignant” moment, but we want to understand what lies beyond our collective “no!” to a future foreclosed by dispossession, debt and ecocide.

Fighting for safe food and housing, decent health, clean air and undeveloped spaces in nature have long given common cause to communities around the world. The “commons” refers to relationships based on shared resources, collective management, networks of mutual aid, respect and dignity. But these commons have either been captured by the market or are increasingly at risk of it. Taking back the commons means reclaiming community control over the parts of our lives that have been colonized by governments, markets, and corporations.

Can we recognize, reclaim and create alternative social realities that the elite tell us cannot possibly exist? A gathering is being organized to help us answer this question. The gathering will cover the themes of systemic crisis, economics, land, food, water, health, education, media, ecology, decolonization, migration and the history of the commons.

December 25, 2011 - 11:51am -- stevphen

Keynote: McKenzie Wark (The New School, NY), author of The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), Gamer Theory (2007) and Hacker Manifesto (2004).

Since the beginning of the movement there has been a problem as to what to call artistic works by members of the SI. It was understood that none of them was a situationist production, but what to call them? I propose a very simple rule: to call them ‘antisituationist.’ We are against the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity. I don’t mean that anyone should stop painting, writing, etc. I don’t mean that that has no value. I don’t mean that we could continue to exist without doing that. But at the same time we know that such works will be coopted by society and used against us. Our impact lies in the elaboration of certain truths which have an explosive power whenever people are ready to struggle for them. At the present stage the movement is only in its infancy regarding the elaboration of these essential points. - Attila Kotányi at the Fifth Conference of the SI, 1961

Is it oxymoronic, heretical or just plain wrong to talk about Situationist aesthetics? The Situationist International (SI) condemned attempts to discuss its work in terms of aesthetics, but perhaps it is now time to brush the SI against the grain.

When it first announced its programme, the SI insisted that ‘There is no such thing as Situationism’. A few years later, before expelling its members deemed to be too invested in artistic production, the SI declared that in an age of spectacle any work of art produced by a Situationist must necessarily be ‘antisituationist’. The SI’s tactical intransigence regarding the political value of the aesthetic, and its refusal of the possibility of a specifically Situationist aesthetic, threw up problems that remained unresolved by the time of the SI’s dissolution. Since 1972, particularly in Anglophone contexts, Situationist practices have penetrated an array of cultural spheres, and much cultural production which the SI would have dismissed as spectacular has claimed some Situationist influence.

November 26, 2011 - 6:28pm -- stevphen

Monday - 11.28.11 -- What Makes a Movement Powerful -- A Conversation

This Monday's discussion begins with the question: What Makes a Movement Powerful?

The evening is an open invitation to join in a discussion at a critical juncture of the contemporary global struggles against processes of privatization, dispossession, financialization, and destruction of the common(s) in the name of austerity, ‘sound monetary policy’, ‘fiscal responsibility’ or ‘the free market.’

Occupare: (Latin.) To seize, capture

"Occupy but better yet, self manage…. The former option is basically passive—the latter is active and yields tasks and opportunities to contribute.… To occupy buildings, especially institutions like universities or media, isn’t just a matter of call it, or tweet it, and they will come. It is a matter of go get them, inform them, inspire them, enlist them, empower them, and they will come." – Michael Albert, “Occupy to Self Manage” (http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/33609)

"I think that our political structures are corrupt and we need to really think about what a democratic society would be like. People are learning how to do it now…. This is more than a protest, it’s a camp to debate an alternative civilization." – David Graeber, “The Man Behind Occupy Wall Street,” interviewed by Seth Fiegerman (http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/33897)

This is a critical moment, as “Occupy everywheres” present possibilities for new politics, and new forms of learning, engaging and living with each other. From the recurring occupations of the squares in Greece and Italy to the UK’s winter of discontent and the Arab Spring, to the summer of protest in Spain and the North American autumn—at general assemblies around the globe, people are running their own lives, influencing the media and discussing what is to be done without politicians. The recent occupations are an education in direct democracy and the solidarity necessary for action.

Occupy Wall Street, and the occupations around the world, are attempts to build the social compositions that are the precondition for action. They are the working-through of a problem that ‘politics-as-usual’ works to suppress—the massive exploitation that is capitalism, and the emergence of politics adequate to address it. At this stage, the occupations are the connection of people, ideas and machines—the cumulation of assemblages that might build something. What happens next depends on what is being built now.

19.00: Andrew McGettigan: The process of financialisation of higher education

20.00: Pedro Leytao:

December 3rd, Saturday:

10.30: Valerio Monteventi.. Italian political catastrophe in the framework of the European crisis, and the emergence of a new movement.

11.30: Amador Fernandez Savater: 15-M: una política del cualquiera

12.30: Conclusion: What if Capitalism is dead?

Autonomy of knowledge self organization of the general intellect. The European School for Social Imagination (Scepsi): politics in the age of post-democratic governance and the creation of the institution of common knowledge.

October 24, 2011 - 11:02am -- jim

"The story behind the 1990 terror attack in Oakland on ecological defenders struggling to protect some of the last surviving old-growth redwoods from the timber barons"

The Libertarian Book Club,* New York City's oldest continuously active anarchist institution (founded 1946), kicks off the fall season of its Anarchist Forum series as legendary Northern California songster and activist Darryl Cherney returns to his native New York for a sneak-preview screening of his new film Who Bombed Judi Bari?—revealing the story behind the 1990 terror attack in Oakland on ecological defenders struggling to protect some of the last surviving old-growth redwoods from the timber barons. Director Mary Liz Thomson will also be on hand.